I'm a huge fan of at-home printing, but recently, my beloved Canon Pixma died (or I may have broken it. ugh, who knows) and I've suddenly had to reinvent my workflow. I'm fortunate enough to also own a Canon Selphy printer, but as other owners know, this cute little machine is not without its headaches. If you're going to use this printer for Project Life, you'll probably want to print out 3x4 photos. In my case, I also needed 2x2 images for the large grid on the right side of my layout.

However, accurately printing specific dimensions on the Selphy is usually met with a combination of surprise, confusion, and sheer frustration. Simple 4x6 photos are always cropped on the long side. When printing other sizes, it's even more apparent that the image is being enlarged and, consequently, you have to crop even more off the sides just so it will fit in your plastic sleeves.

After making the rounds to various printing forums, and not a little time troubleshooting, I learned some things about the Selphy:

it automatically overprints by approximately 4% and can't be adjusted

the max resolution is actually 1823x1232, but if you try to print anything larger than 1800x1200, the printer won't recognize the file

it has trouble reading certain types of jpgs (something about EXIF data, whatever that means)

So, I created this Photoshop template to streamline my workflow. Feel free to download for your own personal use as well! It's meant for printing 3x4 and 2x2 images because that's what I'll be using the most in my Project Life album. However, if you find your Selphy suddenly not reading files, cut and paste your image into this template and save as jpg. It's a fussy little machine, but this template is like magic :)

Below are some closeups of my layout. You can see that I printed true 3x4 and 2x2 images and I didn't have any cropping. Basically, what I saw on the screen is what came out of the printer. Yesss.

Hope this is helpful! The template is pretty straightforward. You can clip your photos to the shapes, or hide them and use the guides instead. If it's confusing, just drop me a line…